Pure of Heart

Not grey-dwellers of putrid sewers

who traverse the pipe-lines of common filth

like rats scouring for discarded trash

No!  This crowd's a stranger mix

They're weirdos who are out-of-step

They're Spirit-freed, fired for flight

for journeys into the fray and strife

of darkened lives wrestling with life

their mouths enthused with Word and song

for lips and heads and hearts and hands

un-enclosed in wants that surely fail

They are the pure of heart

whose lives are packed with God's caring sense

for broken bods and needs unmet

a God for all and all in God

whose eyes are mirrors reflecting Light

are panes drawing in and giving back 

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -"All the contradictions are to be found in me, according as the wind turns and changes. (Montaigne)"  If we are to move ahead in our pilgrimage, we will have to give up our longing for consistency.

  -Allow yourself to think about your self as a work-in progress, a work of art.  We learn about being human by imitation and repetition.  Art's mystery lies in the fact that every repetition or performance is unique and unrepeatable.  Just like you.  Allow for the possibility of revelation.

  -Being human is like learning a craft, and becoming part of a tradition.  We are in it together.  Salvation is social.

  -...we learn by paying attention, by listening, by practice.  

Provocateur

I paused this morning to peer through the mirror

to gaze through eyes both green and grey

to plumb the visage upon the glass

I stared to see beyond beyond

to cross into some heart and soul 

to touch The Face upon each face

my face, Christ's face, facing each face

The image stands curious

on a morning after bath

as the world awakens to day

and I to questions of  Life

This icon I bear, is it Christ?

Is he the one staring back at me?

If he's the one, then who are the others?

Is his face the mirror of their eyes

the molding of their lips

the coloring of their skin

the silence of their cries

the laughter of their hearts?

*Every person wants to be loved by someone, in someway, for nothing...and God is the only One who can, who will and does love us, absolutely, in this way.  We persons must strive to imitate God  in our loving. 

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -...we are all actors playing parts (by turns, tragic and comic) in a drama of infinite variety.  We cannot avoid playing a role.  Sometimes we are the audience; sometimes the victim; sometimes the righteous judge or the wronged lover.  The roles change, although some of us prefer certain roles in life that we play little else: the martyred mother, the angry father, the rebellious child.

  -If we play a role long enough we can become it, and so we find it hard at the end of our performance to take off the costume, remove the make-up, and allow ourselves the right (as scary as it is sometimes) to stand naked, for even a few moments.

  -...while the drama of life appeared a hit-and-miss affair, I had the power to make the best of it.

  -"There are no small rolls, only small actors," and I would not have believed it had I known it.

Prophets on high

What's at the end of the rainbow?  Gold?

Dreams and hopes more durable than gold?

Porous faith siding with doubt?

Unbelief struggling midst moist tears?

Rainbows arrive after the storm

after the thunder and clapping rolls round the sky

bending their soft frame toward the earth

arching their backs in adoration toward God.

Rainbows never birth themselves.

Brightened by the sun's warming light

their flesh glows with prisms of hope.

They are the curve of prayer from on high

mystics bowed in the moistured sky

proclaiming love, tossing fear aside.

Rainbows are prophets hovering in the sky

covenantal promises for those looking high.

*...when do men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts?  They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves.

-Carl Jung

*...nothing is more dangerous than to play the hero.

-Carl Jung

*...solitude leads one away from other people only to bring you closer to them once you are able to face yourself in your entirety.

-Carl Jung

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Novelist Walter Percy wrote somewhere that artists and people of the Spirit are often like the canaries people used to send down the coal mines to see if the air was sweet and safe enough to breath.  Some people are like that.  They are sent ahead of us to test the air.  And some of them suffer greatly on our behalf so that we can breathe.  It may sound grim to affirm (also with Walker Percy) that the person of faith is an ex-suicide, the one who has faced death and said to herself, "I may as well live!"  She can get up in the morning and laugh and go on to work because she doesn't have to.

  -Prayer is a daily placing oneself on the threshold of death.  It helps us anticipate and participate in our dying, and this is good news because it also means we participate in the new life of the Spirit. The deal is this.  You wake up!  You're alive!  You win!

  -"Surfaces can be seen, but depths must be interpreted."

  -Truth is also fiction.  Truth is a story.  And stories lie as well as tell the truth.  We shall have to take care.

porter

guest welcoming-guardian  of my spirit

host to visitors and banisher of doom

the entrance to my cave needs vigilant watching

for more than bats in my belfry buzz

and wolves prowl at the inner door

to snatch the lambs pasturing 'bout my core

you know the sound of my cry

you speak your words in dream-land tongues

bearing truth as a messenger to me

shepherd clothed as an open door

you guard against danger lurking ahead

you are assurance seven-fold

*Self-definition is the highest form of integrity.

-Lethe Bashar

*Better to be casts out of the church than to deny Christ.

-Anne Hutchinson

*"...when do men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts? They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves."

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

-..."the truth that matters to people is not factual truth but moral truth; not a narrative that tells what happened but a narrative that explains why it happened and who is responsible."

-Choosing the prism through which we see the world is a matter of faith.

-...film director Ermanno Olmi, during the presentation of a letter by Pope John Paul II to artists at the Vatican in April, 1999, said in an interview printed in Italy Daily, "The night before the start of NATO they were showing Roberto Begnini's Life is Beautiful in Belgrade, and everyone was going there to be moved by this representation of the sacredness of life.  So I ask myself how much art really counts for in people's lives."

Photo

I sat alone

sad and bored

mopishly suppressed

by the dead TV set

near Lenny

and a dying pine

tinseled for Christmas

as Vincent smiled

and Edward stared

near Mama

behind the photo box

awaiting the snap

and the slow birth of Christ 

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -It is one thing, therefore, to assemble the facts but quite another to find a story that is faithful to the facts.

  -Life is a kind of dance and we have to learn the steps.

  -If you knew all there was to know about me, would you still love me?

  -...the deep truth of the spiritual life is that we can begin again, we can be born anew.

  -The question is which is greater, your sin or God's love?

  -"And all the wickedness in the world that man might work or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped into the sea."

  -We have a double task, then, of being as clear and accurate as we can in our truth-telling but also of knowing how the various truths relate to one another.  That relationship will depend on the story we tell and where, in the scheme of things, we place all the actors in the drama.

  -As I grow spiritually, can I discern that compassion, mercy, tenderness, and generosity are on the side of truth rather than judgmentalism, resentment, and vindictiveness? 

perhaps

perhaps i should kneel and pray

perhaps i should sit nakedly still

perhaps i should catch you on tv

perhaps hope must trust to be screened

perhaps i should trust queries and doubts

perhaps in the morning answers will rise

perhaps you're kneeling by my side

perhaps the stillness is your robe

perhaps solitude dresses your silence

perhaps there's none like you upon earth

perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

i'll silently sit, patiently awaiting you

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -What makes us choose a particular story, a particular narrative, by which to interpret our experience and not another?

  -As the philosopher Diogenes Allen writes, "When we treat other people as objects subordinate to our goals, their mystery has no effect on us.  The larger mystery into which genuine personal encounter can lead us never becomes open to us".  Sometimes we use force to protect us from the mystery of others.  Our desire for control cuts us off from the depths of the truth that comes to us only when we are available to the others.  The necessity of being available to others in order to achieve a deeper kind of truth understandably makes us nervous.  We take refuge in "facts", in the hard truths of science.  Facts, after all, are more reliable than people.  Middle C is always middle C.  Better to stay with what we know than leap into the abyss of the unknown and untried. 

  -When life is simply one thing after another, with no connecting narrative, what are we to do?

  -What happens when there aren't any certainties left to undermine?

  -We should take care what stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and yet the point is, we cannot do without a story of some sort.  The facts demand it.

  -Literalism is the enemy of truth in this deepest sense because its lens is too narrow.

  -One of the early Christians accused the heretics of taking all the bits and pieces of the life and work of Christ and assembling them into the head of a fox instead of the face of Jesus.

other than

being other than

what one is or

who one has

striven to be or

being both in 

the pod like 

peas split and 

flowering-siamese

is a 

schizophrenic pull

in the heart of 

ones life

tearing it into

fragments and strife.

who'd bow to 

the pressure and pow'r

each pines to stage

in one's life:

artisan-parent

parenting-priest

celebrants of spirits dancing

in the valley of ones dreams

expressing and urging

exploding into

firework-facets 

of the Divine Within?

i know not which 

yearning union of 

the twos

but might not both 

be heard

in some maniacal twirl

spinning for

a side of each?

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -What does it take for you to be truly at home with yourself, to be honored in your deepest self?

  -We do not have to give up on our ideals, provided we know our need for forgiveness.

  -The Greek word for truth is aletheia - it has the word lethe in the middle of it, the river of forgetfulness.  Truth-telling uncovers what has been repressed and forgotten.  It is a form of restoration for the soul.

  -Being human involves our bearing a kind of open wound, the sign of a future over which we have no control and in which the choices we make have unforeseen and unintended consequences. 

  -The longing for truth has to do with being recognized, desired, and loved.  God sees, recognizes and loves us.  This is how one tradition has tried to speak of the Absolute Truth, as sustaining Love. The search for truth and truthfulness, for trust and integrity, means we are willing to seek out the root of our longing to be in relationships that recognize and respect us.

our personal gods are hungry

Moloch feeds on the "False":

erratic, soulless

rootless chasings

gossamer-dreams

of cowards and slaves

lying, seducing

drawing into bondage

via divergent pursuits

or one's own struggling self

we fly past Christ

past his crucifixion

floating on foggy paths

into the jaws of greed

into the weaknesses of gods

into their birthing gloom

yet, here He always stands

welcoming into His Home

Reflections of Alan Jones:

-Human beings can never quite do justice to the inner truth of things.  Our speech is never completely accurate; in facet, we can say true things falsely, speak the literal truth and still be untrustworthy.

-When we speak and mean what we say, and try to act on what we say and mean, we move closer to what we are meant to be.

-Language, then, forms us rather than informs us.  When it is corrupted, other corruptions follow. George Orwell's horror story 1984 is a parable about what happens when words are cut off from their true meanings.  In Dante's Inferno, the deepest circle of hell is deceit and betrayal.  The corruption of language means the breakdown of human relations.  It is a form of forgery.  When the currency of human interaction is counterfeit we are all lost.  Words are our means of communication.  Pollute our relationships with flattery and deceit, our language with lies and propaganda, our common life with the self-serving use of images, and what happens?  We can no longer reach each other, and, what is worse, we lose touch with ourselves.

on his bed writing

laying on his bed writing

thoughts arose from the author's innards

like a lightening rod of blood shot through

it stoked the fire smoldering in his womb

sensations of parenting rose as a sweeping force

moistening his mind with its creative beat

it was like a stream of sperms bearing a million births

swimming home to share their bliss

he knew not which child would birth

but the wonder-gift was in the flow

*To Trinity

when

I am

no longer

more 

or 

less

than

you

or

you

to

me

we

one

we 

ring

we

Trinity

   

                                                  -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -We resist admitting that there are levels of truth (some truths are not as important as others) and find it annoying that something could be true on one level and not on another.

  -We realized how dangerous the verb to be is, especially when we allow a minor - if significant - truth about someone (John is an alcoholic) to define reality.  John is an alcoholic, but that is nor all he is; to say so is a lie.

  -Theologian Charles Williams once pointed out that the word is either spiritual truth or verbal filth.  Human beings can never quite do justice to the inner truth of things.  Our speech is never completely accurate; in fact, we can say true things falsely, speak the literal truth and still be untrustworthy.

  -When we speak and mean what we say, and try to act on what we say and mean, we move closer to what we are meant to be.

  -Integrity, in the end, is a gift rather than an achievement.

On the edge of anger

On the edge of anger

one stands with teeth wired

holding a scream while poised to bite

like vampires, those available throats

of victims for blood

to taste their pain

or chew them out

On the edge of anger

toxins bubble

through voice and stance

looking for victims

to poison their hearts

On the edge of anger

revenge strikes hard

with swift blows 

like rattlers, strollers

on a day-out

suspecting no dangers

having their moment of fun

On the edge of anger

anything could happen

standing on a cliff

leaning 'gainst a rock

unbalanced on the bluff

On the edge of anger

we grit our teeth

look beyond our feet

grabbing a gun

forgetting how to speak

to do something evil

to harm the errant one

teaching them a lesson

for being our irritant

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -"Surfaces can be seen, but depths must be interpreted." (quoting Ken Wilbur, the philosopher).

  -When trust becomes a matter of doubt in human relations, something incalculable is lost.  Think of our propensity for litigation and for throwing people in jail, for relying on legal controls to regulate personal life when only forgiveness and reconciliation will work.

  -Life falls apart when there are no shared stories embodying agreed-upon values.

  -These are among the many forces in the world that erode the conviction that each of us is responsible for our actions and therefore we are able to trust each other.  We are more helpless than ever before the power of the pressures of society and its special interest groups.  If I am to trust you and you are to trust me, both of us have to be reasonably confident that the other is responsible for his or her actions.  Without that moral compass we are lost.  A world of individuals who cannot trust one another is a form of hell.

observations on a day of watching

i.

we're like dogs that bark

seeking attention

protecting nothing

ii.

like dogs gathered about a bitch in heat

teen boys pack about girls

sashaying past the school

iii.

a couple makes waves on the bank

as a ship sails by at slow pace

rhyming with their grace

iv.

women don't stand when they pee

their wrath does not sit when it flares

love swaying either way

v.

our bodies are ghosts

they frighten us

we cover and run

*Understand

under

a hint

at being

more

than I

can

imagine

there

I want to

stand

                                                  -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -The deeper we get into the subject of truth-telling, the more complex it becomes.

  -If I want to know the truth about you, I have to rely on your revealing something of your inner self.

  -Remember, only love can be entrusted with the truth.

  -You have to go deeper than the facts if you want to know the truth of who I am, and swim in the deep waters of interpretation.  How we interpret each other will depend on the kind of language we speak and the inner dictionaries available to us. Who am I will be filtered through the grid of your hopes and fears.  Who you are will be subject to the same filtering.  It is not always pleasant, but there is no other way to fullness of life.

-

o heart-down place

where life bubbles with the Spirit's grace

where slow-motion murmurings herd

into the ears of contemplative space

dark waters flow 'neath inner light

irrigating dry-prayers of the night

planting faith 'tween rows of hope

in soil plowed by blades of love

there, Living is alive

and the Real, seed for persons and bread

*Now

where

nothing

moves

everywhere

                                               -Jerry Schroeder

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Many experience the past as a burden, even a tragedy.  When we experience life as a waste of time, we lose hope.  As Jacob Needleman writes, "There is that in us which could give us an entirely different kind of future than the one we are trying to fabricate from our anxious imaginings."  He points out that the way we experience the passing of time depends entirely on the degree to which we are either seeking truth or pursuing a lie.  It is because of our lies and self-deceptions that we suffer from spiritual starvation.  What are we?  What are we meant to be?  Whom are we meant to serve? These are both faith questions and truth questions. The spiritual life is about beginning again, about rebirth, about God as a great incomprehensible presence within each one of us.  We are not what we think we are.  We are both more and less: more, because we are deeper and lovelier than we know; less, because we often inflate ourselves by power, money or arrogance to compensate for our feared insignificance.  As Needleman write, "We squander our time because we do not remember the truth about ourselves or about the world in front of us."  When we pursue a lie, we are ruled by negative emotions: fear, guilt, self-pity, hurt feelings, anger, lovesickness.  We nurse these feeling and become addicted to negativity, self-pity, and resentment.  We even hug our guilt over trivial things.

  -The deeper we get into the subject of truth-telling, the more complex it becomes.

  -If I want to know the truth about you, I have to rely on your reveling something of your inner self.

o what a morning

the silent night lays her dress upon the grass

that evening's spring might leap into morning's light

naked sprites dance freshness upon the land

during hours of sleep when dreams tumble with the night

birds gather for their morning chat

talking o'er the pickings for the day

laughter-peels roll about in play

bunching themselves in balls upon blades of grass

*Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world, a heaven.  Know then, that the world exists for you... Build, therefore, your own world.

                                    -Ralph Waldo Emerson

*...there is life in theory and there is life in practice.

                                         -Meera Subramanian

*A happy ending is only an approximate good, pointing beyond itself to a time when happy endings will be happy for all the deserving, and evil will be fully recognized and purged.

                -Paula Maranty Cohen

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Is a truth spoken with a motive to hurt really a truth?

  -Truth-telling is hard work because it requires a discerning and loving heart as well as respect for accuracy.

  -Real truth telling involves some uncomfortable admissions.

  -He found that at the root of the search for truth is always a call to a change of life (conversion) and a renewed mind (repentance).  When I seek the truth I have to be prepared for a revelation about myself, which may cause a revolution.

  -Being the truth involves sorting out memories and impressions of the past in order to live in the present without  pretense.

o God of the piecing quiet

you say more in silence

than we in our noise

speaking to us in gentle voice 

when will we enclose the din

with the attentive sounds of silence

when will we echo your spirit

with the tumult of the quiet

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -It is easy to see how truth - if we pursue it diligently - always leads to questions of trust.

  -Truth-telling actually creates a community of trust.

  -...if its impossible too have courage without convictions, it's equally impossible to have convictions without knowledge and understanding.

  -The pursuit of truth has its own disciplines of accuracy and collaboration, of trust and humility. Truth and trust build community.

night's hungering

a mouth reeking of venom

and lips flashing red

my hands reach for love

smeared with the sap of a fir.

one might believe it's Christmas

as colors blink 'bout my face

but it's the light of the damned

flickerings of those who feel lost.

i stand before an icon

Christ's eye's black with judgment.

they're rods rolled in fire

cauterizing the wound of my soul.

joy's flown, lighted upon a height.

rough climb, the rocky precipice

more than my skills allow

need assistance as companion

to scale the sharp outcropping rocks.

need joy, need peace

as sadness rots my gut

as anger smokes my bones.

my night's hungering for daylight

my dark groans for the sun.

*The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of.

-Paschal

*The dangers of life are many, and safety is one of those dangers.

-Goethe

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -If we begin with sloppy or inaccurate information, we will soon find ourselves caught in a web of deception.

  -Concern for truth cannot be taken for granted.

  -We know that what is accurately true and what is accepted as true are not always the same.

  -The problem with the culture of victimization is that it obscures the real victims.  That is one of the reasons why it is important to go on searching for the truth even though it is often messy and difficult.

  -Because we cannot know everything does not mean that we cannot know something.

Night Interior

The lights flee in the night as if afraid of their own shadow

awaiting the announcement of a  bombardment of fire-flies

Before the nighttime crumbles under the weight of daylight

a trumpeter awakens the droggy ones who fled the distractions

believing the hour had arrived for the challenge to be set aside

and await the Armageddon that would set them again in the world

As the blasted music builds to a tone from which blues exudes

patrons blabber complacent words searching for some hope

privileged to be the spokespersons for their temporary gods

I sit listening to the wailing sound trapped in the noisy air

restless as a spirit caged within a silent box

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Dislocation prepared him for revelation and opened him up to new possibilities.

  -He simply woke up to the truth that he had only one life to live, that it wasn't a rehearsal, that we are mistaken if we think that we can stand on the sidelines of our lives and be spectators.

  -"Until you want the truth as strongly and passionately as you wanted that breath of air, don't come to me asking for enlightenment!"

  -"I finally understood what life is about; it's about losing everything.  Losing the baby who becomes a child, losing the child who becomes an adult, like the trees lose their leaves.  So every morning we must celebrate what we have."

narcisso castrato

as surge of pain

hot on the tip of his nerves:

the scaple spared no haste

in trimming of his flesh

to shape his falsetto range

he sings to what they chipped

with sounds alone issuing from his throat

no voice his own

beyond the cream and prettiness

superb and brought by a knife

a disfigured male is he

wounded where the hormones played

when testes to their ashen bed

fell, flinging the man away

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -When the tie between information and human purpose is severed, what use are little bits of information?

  -We go shopping for myths and stories, particularly those that give us reason to blame something or someone for our pain. 

  -...truth without love is a lie.

  -Only love can be entrusted with the truth, and the truth about you is a complex and multi-layered story.

  -...when it comes to the truth about another person, compassion is the interpretive key

if ever you wish to fly, run

with all the strength within you

run like a gazelle, leaping

leaping o'er the obstacles you're holding

bearing them to the box of your containment

release your self from the trap of containment

from the leech encircling your heart

allow your tears to flow, be freed

from the barnacles of ancient ghosts

who laugh at your wasted tears

washing away the pain of struggles for freedom

you are more than a baboon dancing on a limb

green with frustrations for you to eat

you are a human, a broken finger on the Hand of God

holding you up under the pressure of glory

glory, glory, if you decide not to plop

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -...to be a child is to be all of one piece, to respond to life, to love, as totally and unthinkingly as even we, who are no longer children, can still respond to the sound of our own name if someone shouts it out suddenly.

  -After we have given  so much of our lives to the task of trying to understand, after we have been so continually anxious lest our faith wither and bear no fruit, then it is a real shock to be told that it is only by not trying to be that we become, that it is only by not resisting evil that we defeat it, that it is only by losing our lives that we save them.

  -It is just when we realize that it is impossible by any effort of our own to make ourselves children and thus to enter the kingdom of Heaven that we become children.  We are children perhaps, at the very moment we we know that it is as children that God loves us - not because we have deserved his love and not because recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he  loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

write me a letter with your words upon it

words unwilling to bite my hand

or suck the feelings from my hampered smile

write, simply write and i'll know you're there

there where i fled when you chased me from your room

you were the dream of my haunted past

the stigma laying on my breath as i attempted to speak

what was i to do but run, run both to and from the...

you know what i mean as i hesitate to speak

somewhere down the road of our constant fleeing

we'll turn to look, to observe, to hold whom you're chasing

is it you, yourself, caught up in the the bog

trapped in the quagmire of our constant disappointments?

i want to know, to know because we're both at our end

and no one can heal us but us as we collapse on the floor

stretching for forgiveness with blood on our hands

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -Prayer is the sound made by our deepest aloneness.

  -People pray because they cannot help it.  In one way or another, I think, all people pray.

  -Christ never promises peace in the  sense of no more struggle and suffering.

  -His own life speaks loud of how, in a world where there is little love, love is always lonely.

  -...if there really is a God who has this power to heal, to make whole, then it is wise to be very cautious indeed because if you go to him for  healing, healing may be exactly what you will receive, and are you entirely sure that you want to be be healed?

  -It is a wise man who bewares of God bearing gifts.

my tears stood cowardly this eve

afraid to fall even in the night

while the children's ghost rose from the developing pan

peering at me 'neath the darkroom light

their shadows lay in the moment of my mind

as it dragged memories before my eyes

their voices distanced by the grasses of the field

as if kidnapped from my ears

*We raise children to let them go.

*Nothing is as simple as we'd like to make it.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -What is the ultimate motive that underlies the unending movement of our lives?

  -To be a saint is to  work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it is also to be strangely light of heart in the knowledge that there is something greater than the world that mends and renews.

  -To be  saint is to be a little out  of one's mind, which is a  very good thing to the be a little out of from time to time.  It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full. 

  -...however inanely and blindly we are seeking the kingdom of Heaven, and in the damndest places, literally, it is also seeking us.  Because it is our secret purpose to become saints, it is God's unsecret purpose to make us saints.

  -To live is to leave, that is all.

my heart sits

heavy  

tons of life

pulling

into earth

waiting

the crush

of my body

wanting freedom

to grow

*Wherever you are, I'll be there, sometime, after you.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

-...as  in every human enterprise, there is a good deal of self in it too - the lure of adventure, of becoming known as the kind of person who does interesting things, and so on - but of course most of them know this perfectly well themselves, and yet they follow along anyway because the voice that we hear over our shoulders never says, "First be sure that your motives are pure and selfless and then follow me."

-So when later on the voice says, "Take up your cross and follow me," at least part of what is meant by "cross" is our realization that we are seldom any less than nine parts fake.

-He (Jesus) is the one we are free to follow or not to follow, the one we begin to know fully only by following.  As we follow, we become, such as we are, his church, which is to say his body - a weak thing in most ways, half-hearted and of little faith, but full of hope for all that - and the only body that he has in this world, the only hands and feet to do his work.  And such is this power that even through us others may be led to follow too.

My days speed quicker than light

set'ling the queries of doubt

closing in for the snatch

hurling me through life

So pull me, black-hole

upward beyond the sky

beyond its flickering gas

into the stars of the milky way

Falling up toward the stars

and down some spout from earth

I fly beyond sister death

in a motion towards abundant Life

I float with a propelled spirit

toward the stratospheric lands

that trust me toward God

toward the Presence awaiting all

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -You do not come first to understand a person fully and then to love him(her), but love comes first , and then it is out of the love that understanding is born.

  -Faith is the word that describes the direction out feet start moving when we find that we are loved.  Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.

museum pieces

we black men curse

we groan

we snarl

we hate

and in anger's passionate heat

buy guns

to air fate

pointing their barrels

at black one's to shoot

a loony coot

dead 

from the sky

we pass our lives

as zombies dying

dying without hope 

for tomorrow's tomorrows

as our destruction looms near

and we grin from our cages

from museum display cases

as objects for extinction 

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -If we are to believe he(Jesus) is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof.

  -...love that is forced is of course not love at all.

  -Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks.  Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt, even as Jesus  on the Cross doubted.

  -But if we have no proof that he is alive, we have many witnesses, two thousand years of them, and yet we have more than that.

  -The greatest miracle that Christianity has to proclaim is that the love that suffered agonies on that hill outside the city walls was the love of God himself, the love of God for his creation, which is a love that has no limit, not even the limit of death.

Milking

I pulled, I yanked

squeezed hard and soft

both hands together

sometimes oned

toward the impatient pail

awaiting in silence

for some trickle as proof

that I drew milk

milk from a teat

Now those long years have past

I, growing old and grey

have learned quite late

the secret of the task:

I never, occasionally

patted her ass

*I am a joyful sinner.  I am not the first nor am I the last but I am a joyful sinner.

*We raise children to let them go.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the noblest ideas that men have had - ideas about love and freedom and justice - have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish men for foolish ends.  Emmaus is where we go, where these two went, to try to forget about Jesus and the great failure of his life.

  -The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears, reveal only...the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal.  But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with all of our being and our imagination - if we live our lives not from vacation to vacation, from escape to escape, but from the miracle of one instant of our precious lives to the miracle of the next -  what we may see is Jesus himself, what we may hear is the first faint sound of a voice somewhere deep within us saying that there is a purpose in this life, in our lives, whether we can understand it completely or not; and that this purpose follows behind us through all our doubting and being afraid, through all our indifference and boredom, to a moment when suddenly we know for sure that everything does make sense because everything is in the hand of God, one of whose names is forgiveness, another is love.  This is what the stories about Jesus' coming back to life means, because Jesus was the love of God, alive among us, and not all the cruelty and blindness of men can kill him.

  -If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof.

manure

the ordure in trough and pen

and other feeding things

is sharp smelling squish

barefoot farmer children

press their toes between

it's fodder for the plants

that color and bejewel our days

a meal for varied gardens

spawning rations for creature needs

this, the offering of all beasts

holds a lesson for our lives:

the cross of our human living

is manure for our spiritual spine

*The problem with/for Jesus is that we have made him "a religion" instead of someone we follow.

*One never kills the baby because someone else may abort it

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -...the storyteller's claim, I believe, is that life has meaning - that the things that happen to people happen not just by accident like leaves being blown off a tree by the wind but that there is order and purpose deep down behind them or inside them and that they are leading us not just anywhere but somewhere.

  -...all that distinguishes a truth from a lie may finally be no more than just the flutter of a an eyelid or the tone of a voice.

  -...nothing is entirely black, you know.  Not even the human heart.

Mannequin male

he's a wannabe-girl

not knowing why

His vagina's fake

twisted flesh

shaped by a cord

Questions play games

boggling his heart

fracturing his soul

Skinny from guilt

playing hide and seek

tagged by tears

Disturbing God:

his journey is long

even when next door

-"Our hearts were made for you alone, O Lord, and they cannot rest until they rest in You."

-Unknown

-"You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people's sufferings and not your own."

-Flannery O'Connor

-"...one must search for the humanity behind the inhuman."

-Ramin Jahanbegloo, Iranian scholar

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -Each of us, for instance, carries around inside himself, I believe, a certain emptiness - a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside his skin.

  -Part of the inner world of everyone is the sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God's voice makes in a world that has explained him away.  In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.

  -Our days are full of nonsense, days that God speaks to us words of great significance - not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them.